This paper explores how the Mongol conquest of China, initiated under Genghis Khan and completed by Kublai Khan, produced a broadly positive long-term impact on Chinese civilization. It traces the Mongols' rapid military subjugation of surrounding kingdoms and their subsequent adoption of Chinese administrative traditions, Confucian institutions, and cultural practices. The paper discusses Kublai Khan's patronage of education, his revival of civil service examinations, and his embrace of Chinese financial systems. It also examines the cosmopolitan character of Kublai's court, the cross-cultural exchanges documented by Marco Polo and Rabban Sauma, and the religious transformations of the Mongol rulers. The paper concludes by noting the economic burdens and social tensions of Mongol rule before the dynasty's fall to the Ming in 1368.
The paper demonstrates effective use of the "concession-and-rebuttal" structure. Rather than ignoring the negative consequences of Mongol rule, the author acknowledges military failures, inflation, and scholar-class resentment before redirecting the reader's attention to the lasting benefits. This technique strengthens the overall argument by showing intellectual fairness.
The paper follows a loose chronological structure: it opens with the Mongols' rise to global prominence, moves through their military conquest of China, then shifts thematically to cultural and administrative assimilation under Kublai Khan. A middle section covers international exchange, followed by a discussion of religious policy. The paper closes with the economic and political decline of the Yuan dynasty and the transition to native Ming rule, providing a complete historical arc.
The Mongols played a much more important role in history than did the Khitans and Jurchen barbarians whom they resembled racially and culturally. Their role on the world stage was more outstanding not only because of the organizing genius of their world-conquering "Emperor within the Seas," Genghis Khan (1206–1227), who molded numerous small tribes into a nation in arms, but also because the Mongol leaders made generous use of the skills and resources of the civilizations they conquered.
Among these civilizations, China was by far the wealthiest and most important. In practically all their campaigns after the conquest of China, the Mongols used war machinery that was the product of Chinese ingenuity, and the history of the Mongol dynasty is filled with the attainments of Chinese, Persians, and other non-Mongols whom the conquerors employed in administrative positions.
Under Genghis Khan and his immediate successors, the hard-riding, fast-moving nomads first subdued the empires that had formed in the border areas of China: in Manchuria and North China, the Jurchen empire of the Kins, or Golden Tatars; south of the Gobi Desert, the Tibeto-Burman kingdom of the Tanguts; in Turkestan, the Khitan state of the so-called Kara Khitai; and in the southwest, the kingdom of Nanchao, ruling over areas now included in the modern provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.
As the Mongols had also subjugated Korea (1255) and overrun Annam (1257), the fragmentary China of the Song dynasty was already surrounded by Mongol-dominated territories when the main Mongol onslaught against the Middle Kingdom came in 1267 under Kublai Khan, the able grandson of Genghis. In spite of considerable resistance on the part of the Chinese, the Mongols forced the surrender of the Song empress-regent and boy emperor in their capital at modern Hangzhou (1276), which was followed by the capture of Canton (1277) and the destruction of the fleet carrying the last youthful Song pretender (1279).
The Mongols, just as other barbarian invaders before them, fell rapidly under the spell of Chinese culture. Kublai ruled in China according to Chinese precedent. At Beijing he built an ancestral hall similar to those erected by founders of preceding dynasties and placed in it the tablets of his Mongol ancestors. He also ordered a temple to be constructed to Confucius, and nine Song scholars were accorded places of honor in this hall of fame. He lived up to Chinese traditions by proving himself a patron of education. At Beijing and elsewhere, the Confucian colleges, which had suffered from neglect, were restored and expanded, and under his successors competitive civil service examinations were gradually resumed. On the southeast corner of Beijing's city wall he had an observatory built, equipped with bronze instruments designed by the Chinese astronomer Kuo Shou-ching.
With Kublai's great appreciation of China's culture came an equal readiness to rely on Chinese intelligence in working out the necessary details for the direction of state affairs. Reviving economic controls, he appointed imperial inspectors for the annual examination of crops and the regulation of food supply. They were instructed to purchase stocks for storage against future shortages. A social security system was also organized, copying measures of Chinese social reformers in the past that had provided charitable relief for the sick, orphans, the aged, and needy scholars.
The Chinese financial system was taken over completely by the Mongols. They resumed the issuance of paper money as an easy means of securing funds. Honoring Chinese institutions and ruling the country with Chinese techniques not only made for more efficient administration — it was also sound politics on the part of the Mongols, insofar as it gave the Chinese the illusion of being governed by native rulers. Besides, the preservation of Chinese conservatism with its antimilitaristic tendencies was a political asset for a conqueror, as long as his own political command position was firm and his military supremacy remained uncontestable.
On the side of the Chinese, the fact that an alien emperor adopted Confucian institutions strengthened their belief that Confucianism was, as it claimed to be, a universal philosophy of ethics and government without civilized alternative. Racial extraction, color, and language were not important to a Confucian Chinese as long as a man in his word and deed respected the classics.
Since China in Mongol times was no longer politically detached from western Asia or Europe, men of many different nationalities assembled at Kublai's cosmopolitan court. Indeed, one of the most significant effects of the Mongol conquests was the bringing into close contact civilizations that formerly had developed separately. Italians, Russians, and Arabs now engaged in business in Chinese cities or took administrative posts in the Chinese government. Among these men was the Venetian Marco Polo, who set himself a monument by writing down the story of his travels through Asia and his impressions of China under Mongol rule.
How far ahead of Europe medieval China then was in some respects can be seen from the things Marco Polo especially mentioned as completely new to him: printed paper money, broad streets, police patrols at night, public carriages, bridges high enough to let masted vessels pass beneath, drains under the street to carry off refuse, roadsides with landscaped borders, elevated highways, and many other gifts of civilization that were wondrous and admirable to the newcomer.
There exists a Far Eastern counterpart of Polo's travel book in the diary of a Nestorian Christian from Beijing named Rabban Sauma, which gives us an interesting Oriental view of medieval Europe. Sauma visited Philip IV of France in Paris, met Edward I of England in Bordeaux, and finally proceeded to Rome, where he entered negotiations with the newly elected Pope Nicholas IV and celebrated before him the Holy Communion according to the Nestorian ritual in the hope of cementing a union of the two churches.
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